Professor Matthew Baylis

Profile

Matthew Baylis studied Zoology at Oxford University (1982-85), and then stayed on to undertake a PhD on the ecological interactions of lycaenid (blue) butterflies and ants (1985-89). This work was undertaken in Australia and Princeton University in the US.

His first postdoctoral post was at the Tsetse Research Laboratory, University of Bristol, but his was permanently seconded to Kenya, where he spent four years in the wilderness of Galana Ranch near Malindi (1989-93). In 1993, Matthew joined the Institute for Animal Health (IAH), Pirbright Laboratory, to study African horse sickness in Morocco and, later, southern Africa. As of 1998, now at the Compton Laboratory, Matthew started to work on TSEs (scrapie) in sheep in the UK, and in 2003 he became the head of IAH’s Division of Epidemiology. By 2005, he took up the Chair in Veterinary Epidemiology at the University of Liverpool (UoL).

With fellowship funding from the Leverhulme Trust, Matthew established the Liverpool University Climate and Infectious Diseases of Animals group (LUCINDA) in 2007. In 2010 he became head of the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health in the Institute of Infection and Global Health (IGH) at UoL, and in 2015 Matthew stepped down from being head of department to become the IGH Research Strategy lead.